Wednesday, March 4, 2009

After taking a nap during the fight against the giant rats, I awoke to find two of them next to me, crushed AND frozen. Judging from the fact that both appeared to have been trying to run away when they were so painfully slaughtered, I had no doubts that it was Octane's handy work.

We continued to stake out the Librarian's home, and one evening, the others saw that a hooded figuring entering was actually a hobgoblin, possibly having escaped from a prison wagon-train a few days ago. We quickly followed him into the home, and I yelled for him to stop, stinky-elf also spoke a word of power that caused him to trip and fall forward. But before either myself or anyone else could act, Octane stepped forward and mercilessly fired a barrage of magic missiles into the prone hobgoblin's back. It would have been quite heroic and glorious in the classic Octane sense, if only it weren't for the fact that we'd been had. It was not hobgoblin at all, but just a regular servant that had been magically disguised as a hobgoblin.

Clearly, this wasn't our fault, for if Octane hadn't killed him, someone else in the city would have undoubtedly slain hobgoblin that was running loose. Stinky-elf, being the wise one in the party, suggested hiding the body in a barrel of pickles. I deferred to his wise course of action, and hauled the corpse there. For whatever reason, the servant was carrying some sort of portal key, even though we had no idea where the portal was. We went back to our room at the inn to rest.

However, the next day, the city guard had somehow caught wind of what had transpired in the house the previous evening, and were downstairs, asking us all the wrong questions. I told the truth, "I didn't kill anyone," but they didn't want to hear any of that. Eventually, they asked us to come down to the station with them to straighten things out, which sounded like a great idea to me, too, but Octane had other ideas. He yelled out something about being too good looking to survive in the big house, and cast sleep on all of them (and me, too). We knocked the guards out, and ran into the city, hiding out in a cat/safe house.

We learned that the Librarian worked with some shopkeeper in the docs district, so we decided to pay the shop a visit. When we got there, it looked like a group had just ransacked the place, and slayed the shopkeeper! Octane cast a Speak with Dead ritual, and asked the victim who the killers were, and the victim gave a description of us. For some reason, we were being set up again for murder! Fortunately, the victim was able to tell us the portal our portal key opened.

Before we left, stinky-elf talked about leaving a calling card, and he pulled out a pickle that he had been keeping in his pocket all this time and placed it on the victim's body. I guess he wasn't just happy to see me after all.

To cut a long story short, we eventually found ourselves in a vast secret library underneath the University Arcane. It contained the books the group was looking for, about the lost empires. As Octane was leaving however, it appears that he forgot his library card, and without warning, a bunch of chains sprouted from a table and attacked us. Octane was able to free himself from the chains as we were fighting, and for whatever reason, took off away from the fight. At first, I thought that Octane must have noticed that someone was trying to sneak away from the fight, and went to chase him down and kill him, but now I'm beginning to suspect that he might not be coming back...